Data Collection or Production Centre for the World Weather Information Service

Introduction

The Data Collection or Production Centre (DCPC) for the World Weather Information Service (WWIS) aims to consolidate official weather forecasts and climatological information for worldwide cities supplied by the respective National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and disseminate the information through the Discovery, Access and Retrieval (DAR) services under the WMO Information System (WIS) framework. These weather forecasts and climatological information are provided by NMHSs under the WMO WWIS project (http://worldweather.wmo.int). The DCPC for WWIS is operated by Hong Kong, China.

The web portal of DCPC for WWIS comes with subscription service for automatic reception of selected weather information. It also provides metadata of the weather information to the Global Information System Centres (GISC) to enable searching of weather information through their DAR services. GISC Beijing and GISC Tokyo are the Principal and Backup GISCs of the DCPC for WWIS respectively.

WIS is a coordinated global infrastructure for all World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Programmes to meet the requirements for routine collection and automated dissemination of data and products, as well as data discovery, access and retrieval services for all weather, climate, water and related data produced by centres and Member countries in the framework of WMO.

WWIS is a web site operated by the Hong Kong Observatory on behalf of WMO. It was launched in 2002 to serve as a centralized source on the Internet for user to access official weather information issued by NMHSs.

Services of the DCPC for WWIS

The DCPC for WWIS has three major functions:

- Provides online services for global users to search and access the official weather forecasts and climatological information for cities around the world;

- Offers subscription service for users to automatically receive timely update of weather information of their interest via RSS; and

- Provides metadata of the weather information available at the DCPC for WWIS to other systems such as the GISCs of the WIS for users to search the weather information via the GISC's DAR services.

Overview of the DCPC for WWIS

The DCPC for WWIS consists of a database, application programs and the front-end graphical user interface. The graphical user interface enables user to search and browse the weather information presented in tabular form. Besides, official world city forecasts and climatological information encoded in standard JSON format are published by the DCPC for WWIS to enable subsequent data exchange between computer systems.

Your valuable feedback on the operation of the DCPC for WWIS and your continuing support to the WWIS project are much appreciated. Please forward your feedback, if any, to dcpc@hko.gov.hk.